Obama Finds Reagan’s Pony

The tax deal is virtually done but the piquant side effect is how quickly an abject surrender has been converted into a “second stimulus.”

One of Barack Obama’s underrated gifts is to act out Ronald Reagan’s favorite joke about the optimistic boy who, faced with a pile of dung, jumps in and roots around, while enthusing, “There must be a pony in here somewhere!”

He did it with the health care debacle and is now repeating the performance in the lame-duck disaster.

This time, the President has sidetracked economists into an argument over just how much the economy will benefit from the face-saving concessions wrested from a GOP victory that will add $4 trillion to the deficit in the next decade.

Now Mark Zandi of Moody’s is predicting that the deal “will add a lot to growth in the first half of next year, when the recovery will be at its most vulnerable. It really seals the deal for the recovery evolving into a self-sustaining economic expansion” as Paul Krugman quibbles over the size and duration of the “jump-start.”

Meanwhile, the President is warning Congressional allies that they will be plunging the country into “a double-dip recession” if they fail to mount the pony he found and ratify his deal with the Republicans.